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Concerns Emerge Over Qt Project vs. Digia

Phoronix: Concerns Emerge Over Qt Project vs. Digia

While Digia's acquisition of Qt from Nokia has been closed for less than one month, concerns are already arising amongst users/developers when it comes to distinguishing the Digia company versus the Qt Project...

They all have to sign an agreement to hand over all rights to Digia but a stupid Twitter account “could blur the lines between Digia and the Qt Project”… yeah, right…
Digia owns all of Qt. There are no lines to blur.

They might own the copyright to the core software components of the Qt ecosystem, and employ most developers of that, but they don't own all developers & software components in the wider Qt ecosystem (they don't employ/own half of that ecosystem).

And if you are the biggest player in an ecosystem, you probably want to be very careful not to give the impression that you're hostile towards other players in that ecosystem. If it looks like Digia wants to steal customers from the likes of Stephen Kelly and the company he works for, I suspect they might reconsider their usage of Qt-from-Digia for future projects, which in the end would mean a loss for Digia.

So either Digia wants to cooperate on fair grounds, or they will have to go on on their own (and probably risk a community fork à la LibreOffice).

@Michael Larabel: This is the second Qt article in a few weeks where you have incorrectly name checked Lars Knoll as "Knoll Lars". Getting the basics wrong repeatedly makes it harder to take this site seriously.

As for the blurring of the lines between the Qt Project and Digia - storm in a teacup comes to mind.

The CLA might have some benefits to the commercial Qt ecosystem, although that's something people will disagree about, of course.

What's really more important here is that the communication channels of the open source project in which many participate do not get abused to promote one contributor (even if it is the largest one) over the other contributors.

PS: if I understand correctly, this happened because of a forgotten forwarding links between some Twitter accounts, in which case "storm in a teacup" probably applies. (But it still illustrates how important perception is!)

The CLA might have some benefits to the commercial Qt ecosystem, although that's something people will disagree about, of course.

It's not just a commercial ecosystem. You can have that with LGPL software. It's a proprietary, commercial ecosystem. The point of the CLA is to allow Digia to take your code and sell it under a closed source, proprietary license. Which they do.

Same as Nokia before it, under no circumstances can Digia be described as a commercial, open source company.